**Six Trials of Burning Hearts, One Casket of Bone Contracts**
> **When desire burns as kindling, human bones become a contract.**
> In the chaos of the late Ming Dynasty, the **Bone Contract Bureau**, keeper of the hidden order between yin and yang, quietly opens its bronze contract casket to collect six souls twisted by the ways of the world:
> - A painter’s obsessive love burns into a **Golden-Scaled Underworld Butterfly**, carrying a vengeful infant into eternal reincarnation ("The Ruin of Torn Silk")
> - The Mirror of Mortal Life reveals the obsessions of all living beings, but its reflection begins to seep with the bloodshed of the future ("The Mirror of Mortal Life")
> - The marks of the moon eat into the bones over nine lifetimes. In the tenth, a newborn girl bears the pattern of a soul-binding chain on her collarbone ("Marks of Nine Lifetimes")
> - In the salt and iron bureaucracy, a weeping steamed bun exposes the truth of human sacrifice ("Chronicles of the Salt Demon")
> - The Kitchen God’s stele carves out five flavors of culinary torture; wherever the cooking smoke rises, the bones of the rules lie buried ("Book of the Stove’s Curse")
> - An abacus bead splits open to reveal an eye, silently asking, “Who keeps the accounts of all under heaven?” ("The Iron Abacus Calamity")
> **From cocoons of desire to souls entered into the ledger**, these six stories descend, step by step, into the abyss of human nature.
> Salt crystals in the bureaucratic sea corrode loyal bones; the diamond mirror illuminates deluded souls; the marks of the moon brand obsessive spirits. At the end of each trial, the bronze contract casket gains another fragment of a soul:
> a scrap of burned silk, half a shattered mirror, a bloodstained abacus bead... each is an **undying will-o’-the-wisp** in the boiling cauldron of an age.
